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Entry #1 - Early memories
12 years ago
General
My name is Alex, and something has bitten me in a way that i want to post a public journal entry... which is odd. I try to not be a very public person, with very little success. And the more I write, hopefully the more any readers will see why I'm doing this, because I sure as hell won't.
I am 18 years old. I attend college in Olympia Washington, and in many ways have grown up in a relatively stressful environment. First and foremost my father, lets call him 'Otho', was not exactly a good figure in my life, except to show me after I turned 10 years old what I never want to be. Among those would be a liar, a manipulative parent, overly competitive, and perhaps just a little bit too sane. He was at the end of his military career in my earliest memories of his... behaviors, and this led to a lot of fun in the future. And by fun I mean a lasting inability to process certain normal human interactions, like gift giving in the holidays, and how relationships worked. Otho DID NOT molest me, so please do not get that idea. If anything he was among the least sexual people in my life up until my last conversations with him not more than 4 months ago, but lets start at the beginning.
At around the ages of 6 or 7 we were living in Fort Campbell Kentucky/Tennessee. Father was a mechanic for Apaches and other fun flying devices on base and mom worked in fast food places around town, really just for fun money, since both of my parents were avid gamers. Things, in general were fine then. However, due to a developmental issue with my lower body, my digestive system was... let's say younger than I was, and as such I had issues with going to the toilet at night. this has long since ceased to be a problem, but it comes into play a few times in my life. First of which was when it started happening, wetting the bed at night, and my, I would think, justified reaction. I hid it. It had not happened for 3-5 years and I didn't want my parents to know. They found out rather quickly of course, but that's when things between me and my father started too... Tense. The first night it had happened my parents had walked into my room the next morning and smelt the urine, and asked me what happened. I had no idea, but for some weird childish reason I tried to act like nothing happened... which obviously failed. My father decided to... give me the dog treatment when that happened. He picked me up by the scruff of my neck and my legs, and put my nose in it, screaming "Then what is this?!" and promptly tossed me onto my spring mattress and left the room, for me and mother to try and clean up. From then, a long chain of bed-wettings started, and wouldn't end for any notable length of time until I was 16, when I stopped living with my father and accepted that it was a revolt against him, or at least something that is simply put along those lines. Anyway this is when my father started being very harsh towards me, and when I remember crying a lot in my younger years. He would often lose his temper at me for not being able to lift certain things, or even just saying something that upset him (I did start to learn how to swear around this time).
At one point he made me do push-ups until I puked in front of my best friend at the time and his family as well as a couple of their friends. I do not remember what I had done to prompt this, but after I had thrown up, he made me clean the bucket I had vomited into by hand in the tub and then I had to resume the exercise until I literally passed out. Beyond that all I remember was a deep sense of shame. I would never again be able to bring myself to exercise publicly... at least not properly. This was about a year of my life, and then we moved back to Spokane (where had come from initially, to New York, to Fort Campbell back to Spokane and that's where we would stay for the rest of this story). That's all I can really leave here for the moment, as stopping points become difficult from this point on.